Time Management 101: How to manage your most valuable resource

Time Management 101

Time management is simply your ability to control how you spend your time. Every successful man needs to have his time management down. Sure, it will improve as you age and mature. But the younger you are, the more natural energy you have. It’s in your best interest to actively improve your time management abilities so you can get a head start on your success.

How to manage your time

Decide your time is valuable

Create a purpose

Develop goals that align with your purpose

Put a time stamp on those goals

Choose habits that will help you to achieve your goals

Create a daily schedule that includes your habits

Decide your time is valuable

Before you do anything, you need to decide your time is valuable. Because if you don’t believe your time is worth anything, then you’ll just end up wasting it. Spending money on shit you don’t need when you can barely afford it, playing video games, watching porn, and other similar things are signs that you don’t value yourself.

You must recognize that you bring value to the world. And if you don’t, then you have the potential to do that. When you value yourself and your life, you’ll care about how you spend your time. You’ll get mad when you waste time.

Whenever I go out with friends or spend a night out, which isn’t often anymore, I feel like I’m cheating on my purpose. Even though I put hours into it during the week and spend almost every free second I have on it.

I know my time is valuable and therefore I hate wasting it. If you never feel like you’re wasting time, then you’ve already nailed down time management, or you don’t value your time.

Create a purpose

Your purpose is something you love, something you can make money at, and something you’re good at

Ideally it’s a business that you create. That way you’re an entrepreneur and not an employee working for someone else. But maybe it’s being a doctor, or doing something else that you love.

Create a purpose that will give you meaning in life. And something that will also make you money. This way you’ll feel fulfilled working towards it. Plus you’ll be much better with time management because you’ll look forward to your schedule rather than dread it doing something you hate.

The purpose is the big picture vision that is never fully achieved. It’s what drives you.

Develop goals that align with your purpose

After you developed your purpose, the next step in mastering time management is to develop goals. These will be more practical and measurable. For example, you can have a goal of getting 4 clients in in the next few months. Or a goal of completing your website design, getting more social media followers, or getting or revenue to over 100k.

The goals are meant to give you guidelines for success. You can make more goals once you achieve your original goals. They’ll be the things that your schedule will help you to accomplish over the next few weeks, months, and even years.

Put a time stamp on those goals

Now it’s time to put a time stamp on these goals. Otherwise they’ll never get done.

It might be getting 60k the first year and 100k the second year. Or increasing your traffic by 2x over the next 6 months. Whatever it is, you need to make it urgent.

Effective time management requires that your goals have a deadline. This is what separates them from just being dreams and ideas. You’ll accomplish some of your goals ahead of schedule. Others will be behind. But the point is that putting a deadline on them will force you to get them done. Which means your time management will need to improve to make the goals a reality.

Choose habits that will help you to achieve your goals

Your daily habits make up your life. Achieving big goals aren’t going to happen with one day’s worth of hard work. Instead, you need to choose habits that will help you achieve your goals.

For example, you want to lose 20 pounds in 4 months. A habit for achieving this goal is to do cardio in the morning to start off your day. Overtime, this habit will help in achieving the weight loss. You combine this with other habits like intermittent fasting, eating the right foods, and operating at a slight caloric deficit, and your goal will become a reality.

Create a daily schedule that includes your habits

The last step in time management comes down to creating a daily schedule. If you create a schedule that includes the necessary habits, and you stick to it, then you can achieve anything. Your habits make up your life. And your schedule determines what habits you’re doing.

You already have a schedule right now. It’s just that you probably haven’t written it down, and it’s not fully productive.

What you should do instead is write down your current schedule. Then write down your ideal schedule on a different piece of paper. After that, take the old schedule (your current one that’s bad), cross it out, and throw it away. Then follow your new schedule like it’s your new religion.

You may not be perfect at first, but eventually you should be able to follow your new schedule down to the wire. If you can’t stick to your schedule, you need to cut out distractions and focus on just sticking to it. Like anything else, the more practice you have, the better you’ll be able to follow your schedule and master time management.

Other tips for time management

Cut out busy work

Figure out the most productive habits for your specific goals

Automate or outsource repetitive tasks

Cut out busy work

This is technically work but it’s really not adding value. Instead, you need to figure out what is giving you 80 or 90% of your results and focus on that.

There’s some busy work that you’ll have to do. Updating my website isn’t something that I find to be the most valuable thing for my business. I think it’s busy work. But it’s still necessary to do once in a while. However, if I was procrastinating from writing important posts by pretending to work on my website, that’s busy work.

Figure out the most productive habits for your specific goals

Let’s say you have a personal training business. Doing a photo-shoot of you training and working with clients can be very beneficial to your business. But if you do photo-shoots all the time, then it starts to be busy work. Instead, do a few photo-shoots a year and then focus on getting clients and training them.

The sessions you get with clients are what will help your revenue goals. The photoshoots are just advertising to make it look good. Do the advertising, but do the real work of getting clients and training them more so.

Automate or outsource repetitive tasks

Automate or outsource tasks that are repetitive for you. Or things that take you too long to do. This will help you to save time and let you focus on the core of your business.

For example, if you’re not a video editing expert, you can waste hours trying to edit a promotional video for your business. This is repetitive for me because I can spend hours trying to edit a certain scene or get a certain effect.

You’re better off paying someone else do the process of video editing. They’ll be much better at it and will give you a high quality result. For you, it’s something you may be able to do, but will take too long and will be a poor use of time.

This also applies to busy work that you’re able to do but isn’t productive. Like doing your taxes or fixing your car. You may be able to do it. But you’re better off hiring a trusted professional and having them do a better job. This is of course when you’re on your grind and making money. Your time management will definitely suffer when you’re broke and need to spend less money.

Lifestyle tips

The way you live your life also affects how your time management is. If you make a few lifestyle adjustments, you can increase your focus, and therefore have better time management.

Wake up early

Waking up early ensures you’re not wasting any of the day. It makes a big difference in your time management because you have more time to manage. People who wake up early are more productive and have more energy throughout the day, given you’re still getting quality sleep.

Go to bed at 10, 11, or 12 and wake up at 6 or 7.

Workout in the morning

Start off the day strong, momentum effect. It’s possible but hard to rebound from an unproductive morning. It’s easy to continue a productive day if you’ve already gotten a lot done and feel good.

Working out in the morning is one of the best ways to increase your energy, feel great, and improve your focus for the rest of the day. Whether you’re lifting weights or doing cardio, getting up early and getting a workout in will help you to master time management.

Intermittent fasting – don’t eat before noon

Another powerful lifestyle tip is to do intermittent fasting. This means you’re limiting the hours you eat in a day. Personally, I’ve found waiting to at least noon to eat brings me a lot more energy in the morning. I’m not slouchy and I’m able to focus and get shit done.

I usually eat something light around 1pm, have a snack at 4pm, and eat again at 7pm or so. Some people have other rules they go by. But doing this has worked very well for my energy levels, and in turn has allowed me to not only manage my time better, but use the minutes more efficiently.

Consistency is key to success and time management

Time management is about making time for the things that are important to you. If something is important enough to you, you’ll make time for it. So you need to decide that you’re valuable, and then pick a purpose to dedicate your life to. This way you can create goals, habits, and a schedule that has your life down to a science. A schedule is necessary if you want real success.

If you don’t have enough time, you’re either not serious about your goal or you’re trying to do too many things at once. You can have a main job, a side hustle, and workout, with maybe some extra time for a hobby here and there. But if you’re grinding hard to get out of the rat race, you’re going to have to cut out a lot of fun, time wasting shit. At least for now.

Once you achieve financial independence, then you can have some more freedom to do hobbies you enjoy. But your purpose should also be something you love to do. That way you can follow through on your schedule and time management.

Time is the most precious resource you have. Master your time management, otherwise you’ll waste your life.

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